Translator's Note:

Blume Lempel’s work is noteworthy for its unflinching examination of erotic themes and gender relations, its psychological acuity, and its technical virtuosity. Mirroring the dislocation of her women protagonists, her stories move between present and past, Old World and New, dream and reality. Lempel did not hesitate to take up subjects only rarely explored by writers in Yiddish–including incest, abortion, feminism, and madness. This story–the tale of a blind date–is no exception.

In “The Little Red Umbrella,” Janet Silver accepts an invitation from an eccentric poet who was badly disfigured during the Holocaust. We learn of the erotic imaginings of this middle-aged woman, her preparations for the date, her flustered travel to meet the unknown poet, and finally, the awkward, challenging, and combative nature of the date itself. In the end, Janet finds herself feeling an unexpected compassion for her new acquaintance.

Translator's Note:

Marek Hlasko, known as the Polish James Dean, made his literary debut in 1956 with a short story collection. Born in 1934, Hlasko was a representative of the first generation to come of age after World War II, and he was known for his brutal prose style and his unflinching eye toward his surroundings. In 1956, Hlasko went to France; while there, he fell out of favor with the Polish communist authorities, and was given a choice of returning home and renouncing some of his work, or staying abroad forever. He chose the latter, and spent the next decade living and writing in many countries, from France to West Germany to the United States to Israel. Hlasko died in 1969 of a fatal mixture of alcohol and sleeping pills in Wiesbaden, West Germany, preparing for another sojourn in Israel. His memoir, Beautiful Twentysomethings, was published for the first time in English in 2013, translated by Ross Ufberg; his novels Killing the Second Dog and All Backs Were Turned were recently published by New Vessel Press.

Translator's Note:

Klaus Merz is one of the most prominent, prolific, and versatile Swiss writers writing today. Born in Aarau in 1945, he worked as a secondary school and adult education teacher before devoting himself full time to writing. He has written more than two dozen books of poetry, long and short fiction, essays, and commentary, along with screenplays for television and film, and stage and radio plays. His projected seven-volume Collected Works is being published by Haymon Verlag. Merz has won numerous important prizes, most recently the 2012 Friedrich Hölderlin Prize.

In 2016, Seagull Books will publish his three novellas, Jacob Asleep, A Man’s Fate, and The Argentine in a single volume entitled Stigmata of Bliss in Tess Lewis’ translation.

Translator's Note:

Yordan Yovkov’s short stories blend polished descriptions of people and places with the modest speech of Bulgarian peasants. “Seraphim’s Overcoat,” like many Yovkov works, depicts senseless suffering met with benevolence. Much like a biblical parable, the tragedy’s cause is unimportant, but the human response is. For Yovkov, loving compassion is the most remarkable human trait, and it is not embodied in urban life or among the rich but only in the sophisticated simplicity of ordinary moments and people. Very little occurs in “Seraphim’s Overcoat” other than an unassuming man’s act of extraordinary empathy. Thus when translating Yovkov, one must carefully fluctuate between creating common speech and uncommon descriptions to make the ordinary, momentous.

Translator's Note:

As a lifelong Indian civil servant, Shrilal Shukla was intimately familiar with every aspect of government in his native state of Uttar Pradesh in North India. This story showcases not only his often very subtle satire—he was not the sort to look for belly laughs, inspiring something more along the lines of wry smiles—but also his detailed knowledge of the daily life of the Chief Minister of a state (the equivalent of an American governor). Here he leads us into the mind of an extremely powerful man surrounded by sycophants, who is really no better than the members of his entourage. The title of the story ‘A Few News Items’ suggests that each incident that occurs in the story might be something one would read the next day in the morning paper. One of these, the inspection of an enormous natural disaster, leads the Chief Minister to a moment of true humanity, as he remembers a similar flood in his own childhood. As he becomes overwhelmed by what he sees, he suddenly loses his ability to think like a politician, an ability that he is sure to recover soon enough.

Many thanks to Aftab Ahmad for his help on this translation, and to Sadhna Shukla for granting permission to publish it.

Translator's Note:

InTranslation is pleased to be collaborating for the fifth time with the New Literature from Europe (NLE) Festival, which took place November 6-9 in New York. Our November issues in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 were likewise dedicated to the festival and its participating authors.

Our current issue features translations of fiction and nonfiction prose by this year’s authors from Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Romania.

Translator's Note:

Daddy Wants TV Saturday Night is a short story I wrote in Michigan when I was a graduate student. It is based on a personal memory of how Romania was when I was around 10 years old, growing up in a little town on the Danubian plain. The political context is subtly embedded in the text; it’s the year when the communist government in Romania embarked on a path of financial independence and started to save money to pay off the nation’s debt. They succeeded, after a decade of challenging cutbacks which included reducing household electricity. A few years after I wrote this text and my 2002 collection appeared in Romania, I thought about translating some of my short stories into English myself. I started with this text for reasons I find today more sentimental than literary. By translating a very personal piece of fiction I was searching for my own literary identity in an adopted language. To achieve a decent version, I consulted several friends and got a lot of help with conveying some idiomatic expressions. It was not easy for me to try this; it took me several years just to do a few pages. Besides my difficulties in translation, I understood that in Romanian I had a sense of personal identity permeating the text, something that came very naturally and was hard to acquire in another language. In every scene, I felt the narrative voice was legitimate and authentic. It was through this that I learned to truly appreciate the amazing translators working from Romanian into English today, such as Alistair Ian Blyth and Sean Cotter. I have seen them at work and I greatly respect both their knowledge and art.

Translator's Note:

Hassouna Mosbahi’s fiction often sounds somewhat autobiographical, and this is certainly true for these two short stories. Each of them illuminates the character of the same type of contemporary Tunisian intellectual, who is a person torn between the cool comforts of Europe and the frustrating warmth of Tunisia.

Translator's Note:

My translation retains the original story’s street names (Frederiksborggade, Gothersgade, and Rosenvængets Sideallé) as well as the name of the bridge crossed by the narrator and Cora, Dronning Louises Bro (“Queen Louise’s Bridge”). Readers who are unfamiliar with Copenhagen and are interested in the spatial relationships referenced in the story would be well served by consulting a map; it is easy thus to recreate the approximate routes of the various short walks taken by the narrator and Cora to the lake Sortedams Sø, the parks, and the Church of Our Lady. We learn that during the lengthy stay with her grandparents that the bulk of the story describes, the narrator, then a schoolgirl, saw her mother only about once a week (and there is no indication that she saw her father at all); it is particularly worth noting that the location of the narrator’s (parents’) home on Rosenvængets Sideallé is in fact, as the description of the excursion to the lake suggests, within easy walking distance of the narrator’s grandparents’ home on Fiolstræde. The locations reflect typical generational differences: the grandparents’ apartment, which the grandparents have clearly occupied for many years already when the narrator is a child, is located in the medieval core of the city, while the narrator’s parents reside in a historically peripheral area that, while it was certainly considered quite attractive by the 1970s, when the story’s central events transpire, had not been heavily urbanized before the late nineteenth century.

The original story uses the very commonly-used Danish terms of address for “paternal grandmother” and “paternal grandfather,” Farmor and Farfar respectively. While I have generally used the formal English terms of address “Grandmother” and “Grandfather” respectively, I have rendered the original’s “Farmor og Farfars gæsteværelse,” which contains the first instance of the nouns in question, as “my paternal grandparents’ guest room.” While this constitutes a slight departure from the narrator’s usual tone, the translation would otherwise never definitively establish that the grandparents and Cora are the narrator’s relatives on her father’s side, a circumstance that suggests particular tensions and interpretive possibilities (it is of course striking that as far as we know neither the grandparents nor the narrator receive a telephone call from the narrator’s father during the narrator’s stay on Fiolstræde, much less a visit). The story is very much written in a Hemingway iceberg theory mode; it hints at but does not specify the exact nature of the problems in the relationship between the narrator’s parents on the one hand and between the narrator and her parents on the other hand, and it appears not unlikely that these problems have been a causative factor in the narrator’s undescribed breakup with the unnamed, undescribed father of her own children, about whom we know nothing except how old they are at the time of Cora’s death. All of these problems may ultimately be intimately intertwined with and have been determined by the narrator’s father’s early relations with his parents and sister or his genetic inheritance, or both.

Submissions

The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.

Guidelines

We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).

Please provide short biographies for the translator(s) and original author(s), 1-2 paragraphs in length. Translators who wish to have their contact information published should provide it.

Please provide a translator's note, no more than 500 words in length. The note may include critical analysis, historical contextualization, personal anecdote, or any other details the translator considers pertinent or interesting.

Translators must have obtained permission to translate from the copyright holder of the original work, unless it is in the public domain. Please provide copyright information (the name of the copyright holder + the year of original publication) for the original work.